AI Powered Content Creation

Content marketing and blogging are great tools for bringing visitors to your website and turning them into customers. However, creating engaging content that achieves your goals can take considerable time and effort.

Artificial intelligence (AI), specifically large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, can help reduce the time it takes to create engaging blog posts. But while AI can help you generate content, it’s not a replacement for humans. Despite how powerful these tools are, they still make mistakes and can’t replace human creativity completely.

Here, we share a step-by-step guide for AI powered content creation and how to use these AI tools as an assistant for creating great content. Not to write entire blog posts but to provide a structure and starting point that makes creating great, human-focused content quicker and easier.

And yes, we’ve stepped through the looking glass here. We used ChatGPT to help create this article on using ChatGPT to create content. We practice what we preach here! We’ll use the creation of this post as an example of best AI powered content creation practices. And for more context, it took me roughly an hour to create this article following the steps I outline below.

Understanding the Power and Potential of LLMs in Blogging

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are massive neural networks trained on vast amounts of text, enabling them to generate human-like text based on the prompts they receive. ChatGPT, for instance, analyzes patterns in the data it's trained on and crafts responses that align with the context and what you’ve asked it to do in the prompt.

While these LLMs can draft whole blog posts and generally do a pretty good job, if your goal is creating excellent content, don’t let LLMs do all the work. Instead, the real benefits for LLMs in blogging are acting as an assistant, helping you generate outlines, and assisting in research to get you started on a blog post. Just getting started is often the most time-consuming part, so this gives you a significant advantage. 

Steps for AI Powered Content Creation

Here, we’ll share our process for how we use AI to assist us in creating content that is engaging. We use ChatGPT almost exclusively, so these steps focus on that tool.

1. Start with a good Blog Idea

You can query ChatGPT for blog ideas, but that doesn’t generally yield good results. Instead, it’s better to start with a good idea for a blog that you know will resonate with your audience, something ChatGPT probably doesn’t understand nearly as well as you.

We’ve written previously on developing good ideas for content using the concept of Minimum Viable Content. To get a better idea of how this works, check out our recent blog on How To Generate Content Marketing Ideas.

As a brief overview, when developing content ideas, it’s best to spend time in forums and communities where your target audience hangs out. Find patterns in the type of problems or questions people in these forums have, and answer their questions. If you find yourself answering the same question repeatedly, there’s a gap in the market for content based on that subject; this is a great place to start for a blog idea.

2. Provide a prompt to ChatGPT

To get the most out of ChatGPT, you need to provide a prompt. Think of this as an instruction to the model that tells it what its job is.

The prompt I like to use is:

You are a bot that generates an outline for a blog post based on a keyword I provide and some details I want to include in the blog post.

It’s essential to be as specific as possible with your prompt. You can add things here like desired length, brand voice, or whatever else you want it to know to provide you with the best results.

3. Generating a Blog Outline Using ChatGPT

Once you’ve given ChatGPT the prompt, provide more details on the specific post outline you want generated. You can just give the subject matter or include some key points you want included in the article.

For this post, the background I provided is:

Keyword: AI Powered Content Creation
Details:
- Provide a step by step process for using LLMs to create great blog posts.
- Include the concept of starting with an idea for the blog
- Talk about using prompts for ChatGPT to generate the content
- Discuss that you don't want to just have ChatGPT generate the whole blog post, just provide an outline to start with so you can add a human element to it
If you don’t like the initial version of the outline it provides, you can always give more instruction or subject matter you want included.

4. Humanizing AI-Generated Content

As discussed previously, LLMs can write a whole blog post for you. However, I don’t believe this creates great content. For one, LLMs don’t add a personal touch to the content, such as anecdotes or interesting facts, that make blogs more engaging.

Additionally, Google Search can detect content written by AI. According to Google,

Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines. This means that it is not used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which is against our spam policies.

They also mention,

…however content is produced, those seeking success in Google Search should be looking to produce original, high-quality, people-first content demonstrating qualities E-E-A-T.

So, you will get dinged by Google Search if your content is low-quality. Thus, using ChatGPT just to generate the outline and your human creativity to take it the last mile and make it high-quality, engaging, and human-focused is the way to go.

Conclusion

While robots haven’t replaced humans, you can harness their power to improve content creation efficiency. Start with a good idea for a blog, use the prompt to instruct ChatGPT, give as much detail about the post you want to create, and use the outline to help kickstart your creativity to output an excellent piece of content in a fraction of the time.

Need Help?

At Peak Digital Studio, we offer one-hour Content Generation consultations. During this call you’ll:

• Get a comprehensive overview of the content generation process
• Brainstorm ideas for where to find good content ideas tailored for your business
• Understand how tools like ChatGPT can help you create excellent content that is still human and creative
• Ask for feedback on existing content generation practices

By the end of the call, you'll be entirely up to speed on how to build great content that gets results without wasting your time.

Request a consultation today!